When my American friends come to visit me in Italy, they already know what's waiting for them at my house: as an Italian teenager, I'm determined to show them that homemade cooking beats a hamburger or a take-away pizza every time.
When my afternoon starts with a batch of homemade ice cream — made with eggs from our hens, milk and plenty of chocolate — it turns into pure fun and incredible flavor, the kind that has you licking your fingers for the goodness and genuineness of my kitchen at Bottega Torciano.
This adventure, which involves my whole family, takes place in our city of love, San Gimignano — the Manhattan of the Middle Ages, famous for its towers, historic buildings and the breathtaking scenery typical of central Tuscany, just a few kilometers from Florence.
The recipe
Today I learned how to make gelato
Today, together with my American friends, I learned to make homemade ice cream — the real Italian kind, with genuine, healthy ingredients, nothing like the ones you buy! How does it work? First of all, you need all the right ingredients.
Do we have all the ingredients? Good — let's begin, and I'll tell you what I learned.
Melt the chocolate, cream and milk
In a small saucepan we dissolved the chocolate, cream and milk until we got a homogeneous mixture.
Whisk the yolks with sugar
In another bowl we separated the egg yolks from the whites — yes, I learned that too! — and mixed them with sugar to get a very good cream.
Combine and cook
We took the sugar-and-egg cream and joined it to the saucepan with the chocolate, cream and milk, letting it cook until the mixture was free of lumps.
Into the ice cream maker
At the end we poured the mixture into the ice cream maker and let it work for about 25 minutes.
Obviously I had to run the quality control — the result was... successful!
And done! The ice cream is ready to taste — do you think it turned out good? I think you can tell from the photo.
It was so much fun learning to make ice cream, and I can't wait to try it again with different flavors. Don't forget to visit www.tenutatorciano.com and www.bottegatorciano.com, and follow my blog at bit.ly/2vo5MU2. See you next time!
